Thursday, February 05, 2009

I had a client meeting at Microsoft this afternoon and, although I needed Tom to help me get to the car and to drive me there (because I still don't have my handicapped parking placard), it felt incredibly freeing to be back among the living!

Ah, perspective -- it's a wonderful thing.

Another wonderful thing? An accessible building! What a treat to not have to struggle to get up a 4" curb, to not have to fumble to open a door, and to even have elevator access to the second floor! If my office building had an elevator I could probably be back at work now. But this is what the staircase in our office building feels like to me:

Although truth be told, it's really only (only? ha!) more like this:

Still, except for scooching on my but both ways (and carrying my scooter on my back?!), it's just not accessible. Even the curb in front of the building has no wheelchair "dip." Funny, I never noticed those things before -- but I know that I will, always, from now on!

After the meeting, Tom picked me up and we went out for dinner at SushiLand, one of our favorite restaurants. The great thing about SushiLand is that you chose what you want to eat as it passes in front of you on a conveyor belt. Like the way it looks? Just grab it and enjoy!

Plates are color-coded according to price...

Count the plates and sort the colors and voila -- there's your bill!

$32 later and we're both stuffed!

Tom was so impressed with the difference in my mobility between the first week when he had to bring me my meals in bed and moving my leg at all was excruciating, to now, that he just hitched up the rope from the scooter to the car and towed me home!

6 comments:

OMG! I needed that hearty chuckle! Sounds like you've had a great day, and boy do I envy your sushi dinner! There was a place in Vancouver, BC similar to that I went to several years ago, but the plates circulated on "boats" in water instead of a conveyor! It was awesome! Same concept, and of course, oh-so-yummy...

Well done you! (as they say in England)You wouldn't appreciate the 82 steps up to my apartment, not to mention the 30-odd more up to the loft. I often have nightmares of what it would be like if I broke a leg...

Those kaiten-zushi places are finally getting more common in WA! They're all over the place in Tokyo and I've seen a few in California too. I'll have to look up that one next time I'm down in your neck of the woods.

I can't even imagine doing those stairs on crutches, one false move and one crutch slipping out from under and you'd fall all that way down. I'd hold off on navigating those for a while yet. Very cool that you could get out and about into the land of real people again. Now that you've made it into the office to meet up, will they be OK with having you work from home a few days per week again?